Digital strategy and Digitalisation Roadmap: making progress together in the digital transformation

This autumn, both mbo and hbo have embraced sector-wide approaches that help them work better together. In mbo this is the Digitalisation Route and in hbo the Digital Strategy. We will discuss this with Jaco Opschoor (CIO mboRijnland and chair of the CIO Council mbo), Wouter Zwaan (CIO Hogeschool Leiden and linking pin between the CIO Council hbo and HBO-CSC), Angelien Sanderman (chair of the Executive Board of Hogeschool Leiden and chair of the VH board committee on digitisation and funding) and Alexander van de Koevering (member of the board of Rijn IJssel and chair of the MBO Digital board committee).

The Digitisation Route for vocational education (mbo) has a different structure. In this roadmap, many initiatives were taken together and prioritised. This was also one of the reasons: the CIOs in vocational education sometimes felt they were losing control because of all the initiatives running simultaneously.

From intention to taking action

The willingness to collaborate is strong, but the path is not always straightforward. YImagine being in the position of having to replace a brand-new system because the sector has made a different choice, or having to contribute financially to services you are not yet using. Are you then willing to give in one area in order to gain in another?

"Sometimes you have to step beyond your own shadow," Jaco also says. "And trust that, ultimately, the collective will enable you to perform better. That's definitely a challenge." He has a good example of that.

Together with nine other mbo institutions, mboRijnland took part in the Osiris collective. They jointly carried out a procurement procedure. The Osiris institutions had the ambition to achieve the same system set-up for all participating schools.However, this ultimately proved unfeasible due to the varying needs and requirements of the different institutions. The executive boards then agreed that standardisation based on the MORA, the reference architecture of mbo, was essential for using Osiris in a more uniform and future-proof way. Everyone agreed, and the institutions have since begun working on this.

Role for board members: defining where you do, and do not, collaborate

Angelien responds: “Even if it is not always visible to everyone, a great deal is already being done collectively. The CISOs, CIOs and CSCs keep each other well informed and have been working together for years. They use one another’s work and learn from one another. There are many systems that are the same everywhere. Studielink is a good example of that. I do think that, at board level, we can still take further steps.”

Alexander: “Yes, that’s right. There must always remain enough space for your own identity. As board members, we have a role to play in this. Together, we decide where we need to join forces and where institutions should have room to act independently. That will help us in the digital transformation. I see it as our responsibility as board members to be very clear about where collaboration can truly be successful.”

"And where you especially shouldn't," Angelien adds. "You have to be honest about that too. With NIS2, it is obvious that you collaborate on that. But when it comes to AI in the education curriculum, this is much more nuanced."

Wouter: "Educational institutions are traditionally autonomous and often set up that way. In the field of IT, this cannot be sustained in the long term. In the field of education it is, and I hope for a long time to come. Because the pabo in Leiden is different from the one in Arnhem. But when it comes to IT infrastructure, such as wifi or educational logistics applications, we all use that. In different digital areas, we can therefore cooperate even more."

Looking ahead to where you want to end up

It is crucial that the Digital Strategy and the Digitisation Route are embraced by the hbo and mbo sector respectively. So where do we stand now?

The Digital Strategy was presented in the general membership meeting of the Association of Universities of Applied Sciences. Wouter: "We made a great first step. The main topics have been identified and there is commitment to them. The plans must now be put in place, with a so-called implementation agenda. As CIO of an institution, you can adjust your digitisation agenda or plan accordingly. Ultimately, we hope that the implementation agenda will interlock for everyone, enabling institutions to truly benefit from the collaboration."

According to Jaco, the Digitisation Roadmap is successful only if the educational institutions truly benefit from it. "The roadmap is not finished yet, we are honest about that," he says. What he highlights as a decisive factor for success is the governance-level support needed to promote and sustain the roadmap. "We are exploring how to increase execution capacity at institutions. And we are developing a practical toolkit to support institutions, in using the roadmap within their own organisation."

Angelien: "It helps to look ahead to the point you want to reach once you have completed the entire process. You need to keep a close eye on whether you actually arrive there, because otherwise something gets lost along the way. Look at eduroam. No matter which Dutch educational institution I enter, I have wifi everywhere. You don't hear about it anymore, that this was once a difficult road. Dare to look ahead to the moment when you have overcome all the hurdles."

Text: Maureen van Althuis